The Arizona senator and former Navy aviator always seems to be calling in air strikes. First it was against Moammar Qaddafi’s Libya, then Bashar Assad’s Syria. Now, having harangued both Presidents Bush and Obama over the past decade to send more American manpower into Iraq, McCain is passionately pushing for American air strikes to deal with the violent spillover from Syria. Specifically, McCain wants to obliterate the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, the militant group that took over much of northern Iraq and is terrorizing Baghdad—and, if its leader is to be believed, soon New York as well. In recent weeks, as ISIL threatened to undo all the gains from a $2 trillion war that cost tens of thousands of American lives and limbs—and which McCain fervently supported from the start and previously declared “won”—the grim-visaged 77-year-old warrior has appeared more and more frustrated than ever by the caution of the man who defeated him for president in 2008. McCain recently called for Obama to fire his entire national security team, which he termed a “total failure.”

Once again, as he has so often in the past, “John Wayne” McCain (his actual nickname at Annapolis) is carrying the other side of the national security argument pretty much all by himself. The last time was in the years from 2003-06, when he took on George W. Bush and his hapless defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, over the rising Iraqi insurgency and became, in effect, the first person to call for the “surge.” Despite all the flack the president’s taking in Washington, 54 percent of voters say they agree more with his position on Iraq, according to a Public Policy polling survey released in mid-June, compared with just 28 percent who say they agree more with McCain. Even a former senior advisor to McCain’s 2008 campaign says that in a war-weary nation led by a war-weary president, McCain is almost without allies now. “The country is not where McCain is. The Republican Party is not where McCain is. Military families are not where McCain is,” this aide says. Jon Stewart, playing his usual role as uber-jester of the national mood, recently mocked the senator as “Johnny Rotten Judgment” McCain, saying his plans for Iraq mean permanent occupation. It’s “like when you win at a casino, and to get the money, you have to live there,” Stewart cracked on his Comedy Central show.

But what if McCain is right? Setting aside whether the Iraq war ever should have been fought, perhaps he’s correct to say that at this critical moment Obama’s not doing enough. That by withdrawing too precipitously and by now proposing a minimalist solution—sending “the 300” (military advisers, that is) —the president is creating what McCain calls “probably the greatest threat to the security of the United States since the end of the Cold War.” In ISIL, America now faces “the best financed and largest base of terrorists in history,” McCain said in an interview.

McCain evinces a seething disdain for his critics. “I really appreciate the knowledge and background of Jon Stewart as a military strategist and tactician,” he says dryly. “If you don’t like what’s going on, you shoot the messenger.” He also argues that had Obama listened to him before the secular rebel military forces were overtaken in Syria, we might not be facing ISIS now. “They can make all the jokes they want to on late-night shows; the attacks are ferocious when you’re in the arena,” he says. “But now you’ve got a territory larger than the state of Indiana patrolled by radical extremists funded by hundreds of millions of dollars, and with tens of thousands of foreign fighters who are dedicated to extending their fight into the United States.”

The loneliness of McCain’s stand against Obama is further evidence of how deeply we still feel snake-bit, as a nation, by the historically long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. War is always terrible, but we are clearly a nation hung over from too much of it—repelled by the very mention of it. Not only is there an enduring distaste for robust intervention abroad, policymakers seem paralyzed by a reluctance to have even a reasonable national security discussion about it, no matter the new dangers. The debate has been reduced to a simplistic binary choice: Get in or stay out, with the vast majority preferring the latter. All but gone is any larger strategic sense of America’s role in the world, or even the time-tested idea of coercive diplomacy backed by force, which McCain supports and Obama’s predecessor, Bill Clinton, also employed. (McCain’s advocacy of force in both Syria and Iraq was always based on the idea that Assad and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki must be forced to negotiate with their opponents.)

All there seems to be is McCain (Mr. Get In) and Obama (Mr. Stay Out).

Because there is no real public discussion, a sense of confusion and fear prevails across the political spectrum about when and how to use force. It’s not just that the era doesn’t lend itself to a tidy doctrine like “containment,” it’s that we have no doctrine at all. You can fault McCain for being too eager to get into trouble spots, but “Don’t Do Stupid Sh—”—what passes for the latest iteration of the so-called Obama Doctrine—is not exactly well thought out strategy either. Full of self-doubt, the pundits and experts are unsure how to handle Assad in Syria, or Putin in Ukraine—even fairly smart, experienced guys like Lindsey Graham are spinning like tops, characterizing the Iranians as terrorists one day and calling for an informal alliance with Tehran the next (in rare disagreement with McCain). When force is used these days, typically through drone strikes or special ops missions, we rarely know about it. Most of us would prefer to keep the issue out of our lives.